Well, the same goes for getting any other laptop. Whether it's an SSD or HDD, the preinstalled OS is going to take a good amount of space. Same goes for Windows and Mac. The thing here is that Windows wasn't really made to be mobile, yet they're moving that direction. It's really more a full laptop than a tablet. It's a tradeoff that you make when buying a laptop instead of a tablet. The awkward thing about this one is that they use an SSD which has a higher price per GB. If they gave it a hard drive people wouldn't be complaining about this (but it wouldn't be an SSD).

don't be so quick to jump to conclusions... I've been using Windows 8 for a year now (beta/RC and so on). I just bought and have been using the Asus Taichi and was able to easily reclaim 24gb of the SSD in about 10 minutes... (about 1 minute if I didn't want to back up the recovery partitions). The Windows recovery partition is 20GB alone! Once I did that and added Classic Shell to the OS... I'm loving it! I can use the Live Tile interface when I'm in tablet mode and classic windows start menu when I'm using it for productivity! It's great now!

Gah this annoys me. Any, and I mean ANY windows pc will have a similar amount of space allocated for the OS. The surface is a pc in theory, it just has a tablet form. For this reason only, its getting compared to something that is essentially a mobile device. In what way is that a fair comparison? The ipad doesn't run osx.